Just in time for Halloween season, Penzler Publishers is proud to present a collection of five frightful finds from the American Mystery Classics crypt. Available in hardcover and paperback, for a limited time at 20% off the price of buying all five books individually!

The Unsuspected by Charlotte Armstrong

Charlotte Armstrong's breakthrough fourth novel! The note discovered beside Rosaleen Wright's hanged body is full of reasons justifying her suicide—but it lacks her trademark vitality and wit, and, most importantly, her signature. So the note alone is far from enough to convince her best friend Jane that Rosaleen took her own life. Jane suspects Rosaleen's boss, the charismatic Broadway star Luther Grandison. Intent to uncover evidence against him, Jane takes a job as Grandison's secretary; her friend Francis soon joins her in the endeavor, gaslighting, manipulating, and impersonating his way into Grandison's inner circle. Can the duo find the truth before they meet their own grisly ends?

The Mad Hatter Mystery by John Dickson Carr

Top hats are going missing all over London, snatched from the heads of some of the city's most powerful people! But is the hat thief the same person responsible for stealing a lost story by Edgar Allan Poe, the manuscript of which just disappeared from a private collection? Unlike the manuscript, the hats don't stay stolen for long; each one reappears in an unexpected and conspicuous place shortly after being taken. When a vanished hat is found atop a corpse in the foggy depths of the Tower of London, the seemingly harmless pranks become much more insidious—and when the body is identified as the nephew of the Poe collector, amateur detective and lexicographer Dr. Gideon Fell's hunt for the missing story becomes a search for a murderer as well.

A Taste for Honey by H. F. Heard

In a quiet village far from the noise of Victorian London, Sydney Silchester lives the life of a recluse led by two passions: privacy and honey. He gives up the former only when his stores of the latter run low. But when his honey supplier is found stung to death by her hive, the search for a new beekeeper takes Sydney to Mr. Mycroft, a brilliant man who has retired to Sussex to take up precisely this occupation, and who shares many traits with the great detective Sherlock Holmes. Upon hearing of the tragic beekeeper death, Mycroft immediately senses the bloody hand of murder. But what villain would have the mad intelligence to train an army of killer bees?

A Puzzle for Fools by Patrick Quentin

Broadway producer Peter Duluth sought solace in a bottle after his wife's death; two years later and desperate to dry out, he enters a sanitarium, hoping to break his dependence on drink—but the institution doesn't quite offer the rest and relaxation he expected. Strange, malevolent occurrences plague the hospital. Among other inexplicable events, Peter hears his own voice with an ominous warning: "There will be murder." It soon becomes clear that a homicidal maniac is on the loose, and everyone is a suspect—charged by the baffled head of the ward with solving the crimes, it's up to Peter to find the killer.

The Haunted Lady by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Arsenic in her sugar bowl. Nightly plagues of bats and rats unleashed in her bedroom. Wealthy widow Eliza Fairbanks knew someone wanted her dead. When she contacts the police, they send Hilda Adams—"Miss Pinkerton" to the folks at the bureau—to go undercover and investigate. Miss Pinkerton is a nurse, not a detective, but nurses are able to see things the police can't, witnessing the inner workings of a household when the authorities aren't around. From the moment she arrives at the Fairbanks mansion, it's clear something unseemly is at work int he estate, confronted by a swarm of shady and oddball relatives, many of whom seem desperate for their inheritance. But not even Miss Pinkerton is prepared for the web of intrigue that awaits her.

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